Dispatches from Canada

I missed parts one and two of Peter
Hinton's The Swanne and just now caught the finale of this ambitious new
Canadian trilogy, The Swanne: Queen Victoria (The Seduction of Nemesis). The
title may suggest some of its problems. The play is a too-elaborate historical
fantasy in which the young Queen Victoria writes a work of fiction. Her story
imagines more than one illegitimate heir to the throne and follows their
adventures through prisons and madhouses and political riots while her own
mother and household and court are full of intrigue attempting to mold or
control or eliminate her as future queen.

We get ham actresses, drunks, and
plenty of crooks and prostitutes, a black boy who may be an offspring of
royalty and is the lover of a white boy who may even be an heir to the throne
of England, or maybe a bastard son of a scoundrel, and singing and dancing and
lightning-fast switches from ugly rabble in the streets to aristocratic drawing
rooms. And when all this unravels, the ending is at least 40 minutes of nothing
but endings.

You'd think that a final dance would
end it, but then we meet a whole new character who sits down and makes a
10-minute speech. Then we reunite or kill off or explain a slew of characters.
Then we get a romantic kiss when the black and white boys meet on a boat headed
for the New World. And we hear a lot about what's going to be in Canada. That's
what it's all about.

The other new Canadian play
is blessedly neither pretentious nor even long. So we begin the evening with a
jewel of a bonus, Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice. I was impressed to
see Lally Cadeau in a virtual walk-on playing the Bastard's mother in the
all-star King John,but Cocteau's mini-masterpiece
monologue is more worthy of that exquisite actress.

It's just a woman posing, pretending,
pleading, and promising on the telephone with the lover who has broken up with
her. She has no melodramatic action or excessive expression. She doesn't leave
her bedroom. She just talks on the phone. And the piece is revealing,
rewarding, and challenging enough to have drawn such actresses as Anna Magnani
and Ingrid Bergman to attempt it. Cadeau is mesmerizing and lovely in it.

Set up by that gem, we move on in the
intimate Studio Theatre to Nicolas Billon's The Elephant Song.
Initially, this clever one-acter seems formulaic in its game-playing, as a
psychiatrist/chief of institution interrogates a mental patient who was the
last person to see his missing analyst. The young man is too bright and playful
and wants to talk about elephants, not the missing doctor.

We learn that his mother is an opera
singer and has never loved him. A woman who assists the missing doctor seems
concerned about him but may be merely controlling or antagonistic. And the
device of Dr. Greenberg's not having looked at the boy's folder before
interviewing him will become startlingly important without ever being entirely
natural-seeming.

It's like a finger exercise that has a
seductive melody. In fact, in this case the melody is the popular "O mio
babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi,
which the mother shows up in full concert drag to sing onstage. But the
characters get more interesting and winning as they go, the surprise ending is
rather endearingly juvenile in its melodrama, and the whole experience is
rather pleasing if transitory, like the Cocteau vignette.

It wouldn't work, of course, unless
perfectly paced and played. Stephen Ouimette is so understated and real as Dr.
Greenberg it's hard to see how skillfully he is working. Maria Vacratsis is
misleadingly abrasive, then motherly as Miss Peterson, the nurse. And a new
young actor, Mac Fyfe, is charismatic and absolutely convincing as the
brilliant, disturbed young man. Barbara Dunn-Prosser looks beautiful and sings
beautifully for her walk-on aria.

Stratford
Festival,Stratford, Ontario: The Swanne: Queen Victoria (The Seduction of Nemesis) at the Studio
Theatre through September 26; The Human
Voice with The Elephant Song,at the Studio Theatre through September
26. Tix: $23.65 to $100.48 ($18.19 to $77.29 US). 800-567-1600,
www.stratfordfestival.ca